The Imagist Movement Essay

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Imagine All of the Possibilities: The Imagist Movement
What orchestrates a movement? It is said that a movement is defined by a group of people who share commonality in interests and beliefs. However, it doesn’t end there. In order to start a movement, in the literary sense, you need a common group of authors and believers who agree on ways that a poem should be written or analyzed. Although it may sound simple enough, rallying up enough people to support a movement isn’t an easy task. In 1912, a new movement established, originally to support modernism, but ended up gaining enough followers to sprout into its own movement, that grew to become Imagism. It originated in London, from discussions that partook in the Poets’ Club in 1908, which included great poets such as T. E. Hulme, E.S. Flint, and Edward Storer (Marek 2). In 1910, well-renowned poet Ezra Pound paid a sojourn to T.E. Hulme, and began to discuss this idea of, “fresh language, that communicated a clear impression or experience” (Marek 2), which would later become known as imagism. In 1912, Pound began to use the new imagist rubric, and began to publish poems which undermined the thoughts and ideas produced by this topic. In January of 1913, poems of the imagist sort began to be seen published in various different magazines, one of them being the conspicuous “Chicago Poetry”. Once these poems began to be briefly analyzed, the word of this imagist movement began to spread across the whole country. The Imagist movement, although short-lived and complicated by some basic contradictions and controversies, definitely left its mark on the literature of its time as well as on many works that would follow.
As more poems began to emerge, Pound and Hulme acquired other authors, notably Hilda Doolitte (H.D.), William Carlos Williams, and eventually Amy Lowell (Hamilton 1), which compose the canon of Imagist poets that we know today. All of these authors together called themselves “Imagistes” because...